A Ramble on Gambling vs. Insurance - and a Fun Quiz
Friday, February 2nd, 2007There was a throwaway line in my post about Farecast that I’ve been thinking about ever since I hit “publish”. “It” being FareGuard (the Farecast product that is the subject of the post), I said:
Frankly, I’m surprised it’s not illegal (since it effectively is similar to gambling or an unregulated derivative security).
Setting aside the fact that I probably shouldn’t say such things so flippantly about other people’s businesses - I assume they did their legal homework - something about it has been bothering me.
It got me thinking about all the different kinds “bets” you can take against the future in one form or other — and wondering why some of them are legal and others aren’t. Personally, I think it’s stupid that a country’s worth of adults with access to compulsory free education can’t gamble on anything they damn well please, but the state of the social contract is such that there’s a political consensus otherwise, and I’m interested in some of the contradictions. My full ramble (and quiz) is after the jump.
